Categories:
Inventions
Friday, March 7. 2008
Our New Year's Eve fireworks shows are something to see—or so I gather from the reactions of the crowd. I don't really know, to tell the truth. Running around with a blowtorch lighting fuses doesn't give you a chance to watch the show for yourself and see what everyone's ooh-ing and aah-ing about. So for the last couple of years, my friends and I have been working our way towards the holy grail of backyard pyro—complete, automated computer control of the fireworks show. We started out the usual way, with a variety of electrical ignitors hard-wired into a "nail board" or a console of switches; I'll have to write a more complete history of these attempts sometime, more for my dear readers' laughs than for their technical edification. This year, however, we rolled out the first version of something completely different—a 12-channel, serial-controlled, microcontroller-driven, battery-powered, pyro ignition device!
On to the engineering, then: the microcontroller is an Atmel AVR, a 90S8515 running at 8 MHz to be exact (obsolete chip, sure, but I had one lying around—the next version uses an ATMega16 instead). This accepts RS-232 serial via the MAX-232 driver, interprets the byte it receives and fires the appropriate squib by pulling the gate of a NMOS high. The MOSFETs are STI P16NF06L's in TO-220 packages, good for 16 amps of drain current each; this high-current capability is built in to accommodate some types of very low resistance squibs that need a lot of current to fire.
As a temporary kludge for New Year's (I ran out of time as usual), I packaged the board and a 12V Sealed Lead-Acid battery in a tupperware tub. Since this was sited close to my mortar rack, which might spit out flaming bits onto the plastic box, I protected the top with a folded piece of sheet aluminum.
Continue reading »
Comment (1)
Categories:
Inventions
Wednesday, January 9. 2008
One of the new elements in this New Year's Eve fireworks show was this 16-shot mortar rack, designed to accommodate the "festival ball" type of readily available mortar shell. The tubes are HDPE with a 1.875 inch bore, available from Skylighter at $27.25 for a group of six. HDPE is really the best material for this application - do NOT use PVC, as it will shatter into dangerous shrapnel if the shell fails to clear the tube and detonates inside. Certain types of cardboard launch tube, available from pyro suppliers, might be acceptable but I have no experience with this so you take your own risk if you choose to use it. The Skylighter HDPE tubes have a wooden plug at the bottom—I drove stainless steel wood screws into this plug from the base of the rack to secure the tubes.
The rack itself I constructed from various bits of hardware store lumber. Since this rack is deployed outside, in potentially wet environments, I painted it with several coats of Kilz primer, then glossy black exterior latex (glossy to make cleaning off any powder, soot, or dirt easier). I also mounted two carrying handles on either end.
During the New Year's show, this rack was loaded with a mix of Black Cat "Gold Class" spherical shells and their "Fort Knox" cylindrical shells. One row of eight was electronically detonated using my computer-controlled firing board (of which more anon), while the other side was lit with a blow torch, like most of the fireworks that night.
Comments (0)
Categories:
Inventions
Saturday, September 1. 2007
Brandon Moore and I have made it into local glossy Boca Raton Magazine with our desalination project. Many thanks to Kevin Kaminski for the article; many thanks also to the photographer, whose name escapes me, for taking on the thankless task of making two scruffy geeks look good. If you live in Dade, Broward, or Palm Beach county, go and buy a million copies, on newsstands September 1.
Comments (0)
Categories:
Inventions
Sunday, August 12. 2007
One of my recent google searches about pipe-crawling robots brought up this link, which appears to be a translation into Polish of some of the documents I wrote about my senior engineering project. It includes pictures from both the pipe crawler web page and the final report we submited to our professors. I should thank ... er ... somebody, though I'm not exactly sure who. They appear to be a lab or research institute of some kind. Well, thanks for the translation anyway!
I'd also like to take a few words here to insist that my friends Sheraz Wasi and Mark Miller be credited as co-authors of the Pipe Crawler work. It seems like my name is the only one that gets attached to it anymore, because I wrote and hosted the web page about it, and that's not fair; both of them toiled away in the robot lab from morning to midnight just as I did. By the way, this is not a criticism of my new Polish friends—many web sites and email correspondents get the impression that I was the only author simply because the page happens to be hosted at www.eikimartinson.com, and this seems like a good opportunity to set the record straight.
Comments (0)
Categories:
Inventions
Wednesday, May 30. 2007
I would like to bring to the attention of my readers an impressive
technological advance made by one David Worden, lately graduated
from the University of Wisconsin with a well-deserved degree in
Electrical Engineering. Mr. Worden enlivened his graduation ceremony
with a light
show built into his mortarboard: 64 LEDs driven by a
microcontroller programmed to produce a variety of animated
effects. Let me be the first to congratulate Mr. Worden on his
splendid achievement in Mad Science—but as a Mad Scientist myself,
let me also remind the young upstart that he was not the first to have
this idea!
In the long-past days of my miss-spent youth
(err … 2004), I also graduated with a degree in Electrical
Engineering, and sported a light-show hat of my own at the ceremony. The mortarboard had
four diagonal lines of 8 white LEDs each, controlled by a central PIC
microcontroller; all five circuit boards were painted black and
atttached to the top of the hat with velcro. Though I must admit,
Mr. Worden's design is rather more complex, with twice as many LEDs as
mine and a fully-concealed circuit.
Continue reading »
Comments (0)
Categories:
Inventions
Sunday, April 15. 2007
As a small project for my Inventive Thinking class, I worked on a simulation of creatures avoiding each other or performing tasks like crossing a street or forming a swarm. The creatures navigate by choosing simple actions (like turning right or left) based on the "Looming" principle of obstacle avoidance studied by my thesis advisor, among others. The simulation runs in your web browser (Firefox or recent IE have been tested, but probably others as well). You can view it (fun to watch) and play with the parameters to your heart's content at this link: Looming Simulation
Continue reading »
Comments (0)
Categories:
Inventions
Wednesday, March 7. 2007
Our desalination project was profiled in FAU's engineering recruitment newsletter, The Pinnacle. Many thanks to them for the recognition.
Also, two conference papers were submitted and accepted, one in Portugal and one by the Conference on Desalination and the Environment in Greece. Should be fun.
As for my desalination thesis, it crawls inexorably toward completion. Call it done by this summer.
Comments (0)
Categories:
Inventions
Wednesday, November 29. 2006
Another newspaper generously and quite unexpectedly weighed in on our desalination project. The City Link, one of South Florida's A&E weeklies, gave us this Resounding Endorsement:
Say it with me, readers: there ain't no such thing as bad publicity.
Comments (0)
Categories:
Inventions
Friday, October 13. 2006
Two new items made it into my geek resume lately:
My own page on freshpatents.com, due to a recently published patent application on the desalination device I've been working on for nearly two years.
Fellow student Brandon Moore and I have been announced as finalists in this year's Collegiate Inventor's Competition, one of the fine programs offered by the National Inventor's Hall of Fame, for the same invention. Many thanks to the NIHF!
Check this space to see how I do—I'll update in a week after the competition.
UPDATE—October 27:
Unfortunately, we didn't win the CIC, although simply being one of the eleven was victory enough. Many congratulations and good luck to the winners and other finalists, especially to dedicated inventor and all-around nice guy Dr. Haugland for his grand prize winning nighttime temperature prediction model.
And thanks again to the NIHF and the USPTO for so generously hosting this event, and for treating all of us humble students in a manner we are definitely NOT accustomed to—I've never been met at the airport by my own limo before!
UPDATE—November 20:
Thanks are due also to the Palm Beach Post, for running a story about this project in their Monday edition today.
UPDATE—November 23:
Last update—I swear I'll start a new post if anything else happens. Another one of our local newspapers, The Boca Raton News, picked up the story: "FAU grad students team up to develop low-cost desalination process".
Comments (0)
Categories:
Inventions
Tuesday, August 22. 2006
Finally I am resisting temptation no longer. I did what I always knew I would do and opened up a Cafepress store. My first product: the Defend Lighthouse Point t-shirt!
Why "Defend Lighthouse Point"? Why the carefully rendered silhouette of an AK-47? It's partly a homage to a shirt that Adam Savage wore on Mythbusters that read "Defend Brooklyn". It's partly a reference to tongue-in-cheek orders I gave my roommate when I was in California during our last hurricane. And partly a ha-ha-only-serious nod to the idea that maybe our little corner of suburbia is worth defending, dammit. Anyway, if you have to ask, it ain't for you!
Check this space for more exciting products allowing you too to "Live the Eiki Martinson Lifestyle"!
Comments (0)
Categories:
Inventions
Thursday, May 12. 2005
I finally finished my doorbell color changer, a modification to a hardware store lighted doorbell using a single RGB LED and an AVR microcontroller. I'll have to write an article about this project later. For now, take a look at the pictures. The night shots really don't do it justice; maybe I'll take some better video as soon as I can track down a tripod.
The shifting hues promise further weirdness inside—ring the bell if you dare!
Comments (3)
